An overview of Groundwork

Groundwork helps clubs and teams organize, track and collect all of their fees online. Our goal is to make this process as easy and stress-free as possible for you and parents.

Here's what Groundwork does at a high level:

Gives you a central place to keep track of payments for each player

Gives you the ability to collect payments online

Automates billing for payment plans

Automates reminder emails to parents

This guide will introduce the basics of Groundwork and how to get started.

Groundwork organizes players and payments by team

Groundwork organizes everything by teams, or groups of players. As a team assistant in Groundwork, you've been invited to help manage a particular team.

A team is a group of players and their payments. You can click on a player name and go to their player page to see all of the payments assigned to them. To save you from setting up payments for each player individually, a team has a payment schedule. This is the default set of payments that gets assigned to each player when they are added to the team.

Adding playersYou can add a player to the team ahead of time if you know their name and their parent's email address. This will allow you to send them a private email invitation that they can use to setup automatic payments.

Alternatively, you can let players add themselves to the team and they will be responsible for the payments in the payment schedule. We call this link signup. Your club may provide you guidance on whether to use email invitations or link signup. You can read more about the two in our guide on link signup vs email invites.

Setting up paymentsEach team has one payment schedule and when you add a player to the team they get a copy of these payments. We recommend setting the team payment schedule before adding players. You can then customize payments just for that player. For example, if one player is on scholarship you can go to that player's page and apply a scholarship or discount. Another player may need to pay smaller installments over a longer period of time. You can do that too. Whatever customizations you make on the player page only apply to that player. You can read more about customizing player payments.

You may not know all of the payments ahead of time. Groundwork also lets you add payments mid season. You can add payments to the payment schedule which assigns it to all players on the team or you can add payments to players individually. If a player has already signed up and you add a payment, they will be notified to approve the new payment. Our rule of thumb is "no surprises" to parents. They'll never be billed for something they don't approve.

Groundwork automates the busywork of billing and reminders

Once you've set up your team by adding players and customizing payments, you're ready to have players sign up. Click send invites on the team page or send invite on the player page to send email invites to players. Parents will receive an email asking them to set up payments.

The parent sign up process is easy. You can share our email invitation signup guide with the parents on your team. If this is your first time using Groundwork, we recommend inviting yourself to the team and starting the sign up process so you can see what it's like.

Once you send invites, the player status will go from No invite sent to Not signed up and Groundwork will start sending automatic notifications to parents. Groundwork will automatically send upcoming and past due payment reminders for unpaid payments.

When parents sign up they have two options to pay. They can either pay the entire balance up front, or they can enroll in autopay and be charged automatically on the date payments are due. The autopay installments are determined by the set of payments you see on that player's page, so it can be different for each player.

When parents enroll in autopay, they are sent upcoming payment reminders before they are charged. The payment is then charged on the due date automatically. Payments then take a few days to process and then settle into a paid state in Groundwork. Everyday Groundwork sweeps the account balance and deposits it into the club bank account. You can see a complete list of transactions in the Reporting tab on the left. The club will be able to see the deposits made into their bank account. You can read more about payment processing times here.

Once parents are signed up, they can access their account any time by going to www.ground.work and clicking Sign In at the top. Parents can manage their payments throughout the season by updating their payment method, stopping/resuming payments (before they're charged) or leaving the team.

Groundwork tracks and summarizes payments in real-time

When someone pays through Groundwork, you no longer have to worry about "marking-off" someone. Groundwork automatically does this for you. It tracks payment statuses and provides collection summaries in real-time. You can log in anytime and see exactly where your collections stand -- how much you've collected, how much is upcoming and how much is past due.

You can also use Groundwork to track offline cash or check payments that are made. You can record these on the player page using the Record Payment button. The teams that get the most out of Groundwork rarely use this and switch completely to online payments. The number one thing you can do to make your life easier is to get parents signed up to Groundwork. We highly recommend making this part of the team registration process.

Next steps to get started

If you've been invited as a team assistant to manage a team in your club's Groundwork account, accept that invitation and create an account by following the link in the email invitation.

Check out our getting started guide for setting up your team. You can skip the step of creating the team since it has already been created.

Our knowledge base is full of helpful guides. If you can't find the answer to your question there, use the chat widget in the lower corner of the screen to reach out to us and we'd be glad to help you.